Mothers and Dogs: Stories - Softcover

Morábito, Fabio

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1635420822 ISBN 13: 9781635420821

Verlag: Other Press, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Drawing from everyday life in Mexico and abroad, these subtle, unsettling stories probe the boundaries between sanity and madness, life and death, safety and danger.

The first story collection from prize-winning author Fabio Morábito available in English, Mothers and Dogs features fifteen tales that show the emotional extremes in seemingly trivial details and quotidian situations: two brothers worry more about a dog locked in an apartment who hasn’t been fed than they do about their dying mother; when the lights go out on a racetrack, a man’s evening jog turns into a savage battle between runners; a daughter learns to draft business letters as an homage to her mother.
    As he deftly explores feelings of loneliness and despair endemic in modern society, Morábito weaves threads of unexpected humor and lightness.

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Fabio Morábito was born in Egypt to an Italian family. When he was fifteen, his family relocated from Milan to Mexico City, and he has written all his work in Spanish ever since. He has published five books of poetry, five short-story collections, one book of essays, and two novels, and has translated into Spanish the work of many great Italian poets of the twentieth century, including Eugenio Montale and Patrizia Cavalli. Morábito has been awarded numerous prizes, most recently the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, Mexico’s highest literary award, for Home Reading Service (Other Press, 2021). His work has been translated into several languages. He lives in Mexico City.

Curtis Bauer is a poet and translator of prose and poetry from Spanish. He is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a Banff International Literary Translation Centre fellowship. His translation of Jeannette Clariond’s Image of Absence won the International Latino Book Award for Best Nonfiction Book Translation from Spanish to English. Bauer teaches creative writing and comparative literature at Texas Tech University.

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the next stop
 
There’s nothing worse than an extraordinary story coming out of the mouth of a mediocre narrator, and that was Eduviges, Señor Ramiro’s assistant, who came to fix my water heater because Señor Ramiro was sick. While he struggled with the igniting mechanism, he told me about his boss’s trip to London the previous summer. “Tell” is one way of putting it, because he interrupted himself off and on to explain something about the thermostat and the boiler’s temperature-regulating device, and I was on the verge of giving up completely several times, pretending to pay attention, but then he’d relay some episode or make a comment that pulled me into the story again, and I, irritated with him and with myself, would ask about some detail I hadn’t understood.
From his story’s confusing collection of fragments, I was able to conclude that Señor Ramiro had borrowed money from friends and relatives to buy a plane ticket to London. His wife’s funeral expenses—she’d died a few months before—had left him without savings, and part of the reason for traveling to London to look for his daughter, Esperanza, was to give her the news of her mother’s death. He hadn’t seen her for three years, and during the previous year he hadn’t heard any news from her at all, so it seemed that the parents’ relationship with their daughter had never been great. That, at least, was what I deduced from Eduviges’s rambling discourse. Esperanza had studied English with a fastidious perfectionism, her sights set on leaving Mexico and her home, where she felt suffocated by an overbearing father and perpetually ill mother.
Lacking the most basic knowledge of the English language, Señor Ramiro stayed in one of the many small hotels in the immediate vicinity of King’s Cross train station, where now and then he’d count his money, because it was the first time he had handled foreign currency. He was suspicious of everything and everyone. He had been misinformed that London was cold; in July it was hotter than Mexico City. He’d bought a wool-lined leather jacket for the trip, and because he was afraid it would be stolen if he left it in his hotel, he wore it everywhere he went. In the parks he saw that the British sat on the grass, but he always chose a bench, and there, at noon, he’d take two cheese sandwiches out of his plastic bag embossed with the crest of the Atlante Soccer Club, the only lunch he ate, and even then he didn’t take off his jacket.
The Mexican embassy provided him with the only information they had about his daughter: She had been hired two years earlier as a cleaning supervisor for the TFL, the city’s public transportation system. They discovered, however, that the name Esperanza Gutiérrez did not appear on the company’s payroll, indicating that she was no longer working there, and they advised him to go in person to the various TFL agencies scattered across the metropolitan area. He was given a list of all of them, and they gave him a map of London and an Oyster card, which he could use to ride the buses and the Tube, and they told him how to use it. He opted to walk from one agency to another, so I suppose that was how he thought of his short stay in London: a long walk in search of his daughter. I can see him wearing his wool-lined jacket, indifferent to the heat, not allowing himself the slightest comfort, as if that would mean some concession that the city could later charge him for, and, for the same reason, perhaps he didn’t cry when he finally found the TFL office where Esperanza had worked, first as a cleaning supervisor and then as a receptionist, and he learned that she had died the year before, run over when crossing the street. I don’t know how he was given the news, in which language they told him, if they brought him a chair or gave him a glass of water, and if he understood what had happened right away or if they had to explain it to him several times. When I asked Eduviges about those things, he didn’t know how to answer me. I assumed the story was over, uttered a few words to express my condolences for that unfortunate outcome, and was about to leave the kitchen when he said, “Subsequently, the next day, a guy went to his hotel looking for him.” I turned around, because Eduviges had not, to that point, used the word “subsequently,” and that little narrative sparkle stopped me in my tracks. “What guy?” I asked, but he, instead of answering me, asked if I had a Phillips screwdriver because he’d forgotten to bring his. I went to find the screwdriver, gave it to him, and, unable to hide the interest his phrase had awakened in me, asked again, “What guy went looking for him?” He took his time to answer: “You see, he was one of Esperanza’s colleagues.” He gave the screwdriver a few turns until he removed the screw, appraised the thread, and after informing me that it had to be replaced, threw it into the trash can and asked me, “Where was I?” I refused to answer, and he must have realized that he wasn’t being funny because he said, “Ah, right! One of his daughter’s colleagues went to his hotel to see him, as I told you.” But he got distracted again showing me a screw that he’d pulled out of his toolbox, identical to the one he’d just thrown away. “It’s the last one this size I have,” he said, and I loathed him, and I realized that it is possible to hate someone for not knowing how to tell a story properly. We exchanged a look draped with the mutual dislike that had fallen between us. Finally, he picked up the thread again and told me that the colleague of Señor Ramiro’s daughter didn’t speak Spanish, so the communication between the two was arduous. He put it that way, “arduous,” showing me that his lexicon wasn’t so rickety. The man explained to Señor Ramiro that the TFL office wasn’t obliged to pay for his daughter’s funeral, so they had cremated her, and her ashes had gone to one of the city’s municipal cemeteries, the address of which he brought with him. But that wasn’t the only reason he’d gone to look for him; he also wanted to let him know that he could hear his daughter’s voice on most of the buses in London. Eduviges fell silent at that point and patted his vest pockets, as if looking for something he’d dropped. He was being ornery again, seeing that I was hanging on his every word. I asked as calmly as I could what he meant by “he could hear his daughter’s voice on most of the buses in London.” In response he asked if I had ever been to that city. I told him I had. “And did you ride a bus?” I answered in the affirmative. Then I understood. I remembered a woman’s voice announcing the names of each bus stop, along with the final destination. You could hear a message like this: “This is a number five bus to King’s Cross. The next stop: Euston.” I connected the dots. Señor Ramiro’s daughter had worked in one of the TFL offices. The voice that could be heard on some bus routes was hers. She probably had a beautiful voice, tinged with a soft Latino accent, and that’s why they’d chosen her to record the names of the stops. Esperanza’s colleague asked Señor Ramiro to leave the hotel with him, and they walked to the nearest bus stop together, Eduviges explained. I imagined the two of them sitting together on the upper deck of the bus. As soon as they heard the recorded voice announcing the next stop, the man must have pointed at the speakers in the ceiling for Señor Ramiro,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Other Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1635420822
• ISBN 13: 9781635420821
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 192
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar